These pictures have been lifted from two of my favourite pornographic videos namely the unforgettable "Lucious Lipstick Lesbian Lovlies Do It With Dildos Doggy Style 3" and "Sapphic Sorority Sisters Salacious Spank Inferno 2"?

You could end up prosecuted for infringement of copyright if you're not careful!

I hate to correct you Onan but the pictures of the blonde chick are cut from the movie "Lucious Lipstick Lesbian Lovlies Do It With Dildos Doggy Style 2" and not "Lucious Lipstick Lesbian Lovlies Do It With Dildos Doggy Style 3".

Guys, I'm finding this really offensive, and so is my housemate ('the blonde chick" -?). We were just trying to take the piss out of fashion shoots. We didn't put the pictures up to have nasty porny comments made. I'm usually proud of how respectful commenters on my blog are. Please don't make me have to turn on moderation again.

Not only am I not against pornography, I've written extensively against porn censorship and been involved in political activism against extensions thereof.

What I object to is anonymous commenters on the internet using the language of pornography to harrass female writers and (in this case) models. Just because I think porn should be legal, that doesn't mean you get to plaster me with porn labels. That doesn't mean that you get to bring the language and misogny of porn onto my blog and into my political writing just because I happen to be a young woman.

This is the language of porn as abuse, and, you know what? After all the writing I've done in support, it depresses and deeply angers me.

This is WHY a lot of women object to pornography, even if they're for it in principle. I think we all need to grow up about porn, and recognise it for what it is and what it isn't. So no, I'm not against porn. I'm utterly against the language and tropes of porn being used as weapons of abuse and misogny.

On this blog, before I turned off moderated comments, I used to get frequent suggestions that rather than talking so much, I filled my mouth up with a bucket of come; suggestions that I'd look better with come all over my stupid whore face; etc; etc. This is what women writers have to put up with. This is what a lot of women full stop have to put up with, every single day. If I sound sick of it, that's because I bloody am. Watch yourself, mate.

Ribald humour is more a male preserve than a female one I fear. Sometimes a fog of testosterone in the blood clouds the male brain it courses through in respect to what is tasteful and what is not. Whether you believe it or not I did not mean to cause any offence and I apologise wholeheartedly to all persons who were upset by or found my badinage distasteful.

My comment was supposed to have been comical but, now that it has been pointed out to me, I can see that in this instance the opposite was true and that on this occasion I inadvertently overstepped the mark.

Sorry.

Here - now - I can hardly believe I have the capacity in me to be so crass. I am thoroughly ashamed of myself.

TBR, Cum bucket appears to be a slang term for "slut", hence an actual bucket of cum is a play on the slang term.

Googling the term revealed several instances of literal buckets, however on closer inspection they always use a much smaller than bucket-sized (and often not even bucket-shaped) object, they never get close to filling it, and I am guessing they dilute it anyway.

If you theoretically wanted to obtain an entire bucket I am guessing you would need a huge number of males. I really do not want to do the maths for this.

So....you're not against porn, yet you reckon its language is abusive and misogynistic? You're not against that language being used against certain token women in a circumscribed way, but when the attitude behind it is directed at you personally, you think you have the right to be offended? Get real.

I quite agree that we need to grow up and regcognise porn for what it is and what it isn't, but I think that includes you, and I think you have a rather naiive (not to mention hypocritical) attitude, if you don't mind me saying. It seems to be you reckon it's ok to abuse one lot of women, as long as it isn't you. Personally, I don't think abuse is ever ok, even if some people do very vociferously enjoy doing or watching or enacting it, and feel a sense of entitlement so to do.

I think it's because they look very dikey, Hazlitt, and that subconsciously makes some men very angry.

Personally, I don't get how it's taking the piss out of fashion shoots either, though I do think that look is a bit sad. Even if they're being ironic, they've missed the boat by about twenty years, bless them.

I've nothing against children playing, but it seems to me that's all this blog actually is. Any pretence at serious poliitical comment is just that.

I hate to point this out, BenSix, but if that's "how it's generally practiced", then that's exactly "how it is".

I also think you'll find that if you remove the abuse and misogyny from porn, then for its consumers, it will no longer fulfil its function, and thereby cease to be pornography. If that's not a definition of intrinsicness, then I don't know what is.

It's fascinating to me how many people are so uncomfortable confronting the fact that such large numbers of people find abuse and misogyny sexually arousing, that they'd rather bend over backwards with all kinds of silly excuses to endorse it, than take on the disturbing reality.

And then they think it's ok to complain about being on the receiving end of the language of it. Talk about a double standard. If you're not against misogyny, wherever it's practiced, then you can't reasonably expect to be protected from it, can you?

I also think you'll find that if you remove the abuse and misogyny from porn, then for its consumers, it will no longer fulfil its function, and thereby cease to be pornography.

No, it wouldn't for "its consumers", because that suggests that all consumers of porn watch it for the abuse and misogyny. Viewers of gay porn might point out the immediate logical flaw.

But, anyway, what is porn? Just depictions of sex towards the sole purpose of titillating the viewer. Do you agree that depictions of sex aren't necessarily misogynistic? Do you agree that people aren't turned on exlusively by abuse? If so then you agree that porn isn't intrinsically misogynistic.

"If that's not a definition of intrinsicness, then I don't know what is."

Well then, allow me to play the dictionary...

Intrinsic: "Belonging to a thing by its very nature...innate, inherent, inseparable from the thing itself, essential; comprising, being part of a whole"

Misogyny is separable from sex. Misogyny is separable from sexual arousal. Misogyny is seperable from pornography.

"It's fascinating to me how many people are so uncomfortable confronting the fact that such large numbers of people find abuse and misogyny sexually arousing..."

Just depictions of sex towards the sole purpose of titillating the viewer.

While widely quoted, this definition of pornography is flawed both in historical and in socio-psychological terms. Erotic imagery and titillating art were, according to historians, not pornography until very recently. Sky did a very good series of (quite serious) documentaries on the subject, which seem to have been in large part an opportunity for Simon Goldhill to talk cock on television.

However, the modern 20th century propaganda, mostly stemming from Bible Belt America, has gotten people confused about what porn is ("Ah cain't difahn pronography, but Ah know it when Ah see it!"). The thing that turns erotic or titillating imagery into porn is a suppressed, repressed, or transgressive social status: it's only porn if people are telling you it's wrong.

The Puritans created porn by trying to hide sex: until then, it was just images of sex.

And (Penny: and this is me saying it :) it's a piece of gender politics: the gender and class arrogance of the neo-Classicists who rediscovered, post-Puritanism, the glorious sensuality of classical art hid it away in secret rooms, "so it wouldn't corrupt underdeveloped minds". By which they meant women and poor people.

That's is why modern, mainstream pornography is frequently so abusive and so badly done. The underlying paradigm of porn is that it be transgressive, and particularly since the mid-60s, misogyny is perceived as transgressive rather than normalised.

If one looks at very early photographic pornography, which I'd like to remind people is being made by the Victorians, one sees a very different vibe, attitude, and expression in the images. Women look physically healthy; there is considerable variation in body type and presence of hair; couples are usually seen having a healthy and clearly very enjoyable shag, in all sorts of inventive ways [1].

Politically, the problem is that most of the images are made for the male gaze, but what that means is that before WWII, the men gazing were a lot psychologically healthier about women (and other men!) than they are now. So my kind lectors should be asking themselves: how did we fuck up the training of our young men, and why?

[1] There's more spaniels than one might expect. They tend to be uninvolved though.

Firstly, I don't know if you know what the verb "to be" actually means? Without wishing to state the obvious, if pornography is as you say, misogynisitic (generally in practice), then it is clearly contradictory for you then to deny that it is misogynistic. I wasn't making a statement about what porn could be, in some counter-factual alternative world or time, or what it can be, in a minority of cases, or what it "is" in some theoretic or platonic ideal, but what it actually IS in the real everyday world. ie, "How it is generally practiced". Which is kind of the main thing that counts, I would say. What's happening to real people in the here and now, and what real people are looking at and feeling in the here and now, in the vast majority of cases.

When we talk about "the language of porn", we know we're refering to a language of misogyny. How do we know that, I wonder?

I don't rule out the theoretical possiblity of non-misyogynistic pornography, but that wouldn't in my view actually be pornographic. Perhaps this is circular, or perhaps we just have differing operational definitions. We may also have different ideas about what constitutes misogyny. There are aspects of some porn which I'm sure plenty of people might think were not misogynistic at all, while others might disagree.

But in my view, yes, if you take the abuse and misogyny out of porn (even gay porn), then it ceases to be pornography. And this is without getting onto the ownership and means of production in porn, which is a whole other thorny issue.

Depictions of sex are not necessarily misogynistic, no, but neither are they necessarily titillating. And while people can be turned on by plenty of things outside of pornography that aren't abusive, the ubiquitousness of abusive and misogynistic themes within pornography would suggest to me that in terms of what kind of depictions of sex people prefer to look at (presumably for titillation purposes), there seems to be a very overwhelming (and disturbing trend).

Here's a question: If you got rid of all the porn that was abusive and/or misogynistic, what proportion of the world's pornography do you think would remain? Your answer to that of course will depend on how broad or narrow your view of misogyny actually is.

It would be good in terms of clarity to sit down across a table and discuss some actual examples, I reckon. Without examples, it's hard to know whether we're talking about the same things.

"Misogyny is separable from sex. Misogyny is separable from sexual arousal. Misogyny is seperable from pornography."

I'm with you on the first two points, but not on the last, and the last most certainly does not follow from the other two points. I would add, you see, that sexual arousal is separable from pornography.

I'm not sure why you presume that I've ascribed an opinion to you, when I was merely making a general point. I really h8 that, but I'll let it go...

Penny Red is...

Laurie Penny, 25, journalist, author, feminist, socialist, utopian, general reprobate and troublemaker. Lives in a little hovel room somewhere in London, mainly eating toast and trying to set the world to rights. Drinks too much tea. Has still not managed to quit smoking. Regular writer for New Statesman, The Guardian and The Independent. Author of Meat Market (Zer0 Books, April 2011) and Penny Red (Pluto Press, October 2011).

Comments Policy

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